Organizations are increasingly deploying large networks and network-based applications to support internet and intranet technologies. These networks connect multiple machines, and often, many of these machines have multiple data modules that are important to the running of the network or the network-based application. A key benefit of adopting such large networks and network-based applications are scalability of resources, accessibility, and improved reliability of operations. It is often difficult, however, to use existing backup systems to view the configurations of all of the machines connected to the network, or to view the backup status of all of the data modules located on those machines.
One approach to viewing these configurations of multiple machines and the backup statuses of their data modules is to check the configuration of each machine individually, and the backup status of each data module on each machine individually. Handling the viewing of this information separately for each machine is resource intensive, difficult to perform concurrently, and becomes unwieldy from a management perspective as the number of machines in the network increases.